Mixed Race Studies

Africans in India: Pictures that Speak of a Forgotten History

The Wire
2016-03-20

Jahnavi Sen

Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijapur and African courtiers, ca, 1640. Credit: The British Library Board.

An exhibition on Africans in India, highlighting the long history of African communities in India, opens on March 21

India and Africa have a shared history that runs deeper than is often realised. Trade between the regions goes back centuries – 4th century CE Ethiopian (Aksumite) coins have been found in southern India. Several African groups, particularly Muslims from east Africa, came to India as slaves and traders. On settling down in the country, they played important roles in the history of the region.

Forgotten histories

Unlike slave experiences in other parts of the world, enslaved Africans in India were able to assert themselves and attain military and political authority in their new homeland.

One of the most famous slave-turned-generals was Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian born guerrilla leader who went on to hold a prominent position in the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in west India in the 17th century. In spite of Ambar’s important role, he is a near forgotten chapter of history. Like Ambar, several other enslaved Africans rose to positions of power and prestige.

Ikhlas Khan, African prime minister of Bijapur, c. 1650, Credit: Johnson Album 26, no. 19, British Library. Public Domain.

“Free African traders, sailors, and skilled artisans were part of the movement of people across the India Ocean. Later on, captives were brought by the Arabs, the Portuguese and Indians”, Sylviane Diouf, director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery in New York, told The Wire. “The people who became ‘elite slaves’ came mostly from the countries that today are Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan. The Portuguese brought in men and women from Mozambique. Later years also saw the arrival of people from Tanzania and adjacent countries.”

Africans in India were known as either Habshi or Sidi to denote their African origins. Even after centuries of mixing with local populations, the name Sidi remains for their descendants…

…The historical African diaspora in India is rarely discussed. What is the idea behind this exhibition and what is it trying to highlight?

The idea was to show the diversity of the African diaspora in terms of geography and history. Few people know that there is an African diaspora in the east, the vast majority think only of the Atlantic world. There is also a diversity of experiences within slavery. I started with a digital exhibition: The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World, which presents the history of Africans in Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, etc. The Indian story was so unique that it I thought it had to be the focus of a physical exhibition…

Read the entire article and interview here.

Rihanna: Barbados World Gurl in Global Popular Culture

University of the West Indies Press
2015
220 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-976-640-502-1

Edited by:

Hilary McD. Beckles, Principal and Pro-Vice Chancellor
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados

Heather D. Russell, Associate Professor of English
Florida International University, Miami, Florida

Rihanna is arguably the most commercially successful Caribbean artist in history. She is Barbadian and has been unwavering in publicly articulating her national and regional belonging. Still, there have been varied responses to Rihanna’s ascendancy, among both Barbadians and the wider Caribbean community. The responses reveal as much about our own national and regional anxieties as they do about the artist herself. The boundary-transgressing, cultural icon Rihanna is subject to anxieties about her body language and latitude from her global audiences as well; however, the essays in this collection purposely seek to de-centre the dominance of the Euro-American gaze, focusing instead on considerations of the Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial corpus of academic inquiry.

This collection brings together US- and Caribbean-based scholars to discuss issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture and economy. Using the concept of diasporic citizenship as a theoretical frame, the authors intervene in current questions of national and transnational circuits of exchange as they pertain to the commoditization and movement of culture, knowledge, values and identity. The contributors approach the subjects of Rihanna, globalization, gender and sexuality, commerce, transnationalism, Caribbean regionalism, and Barbadian national identity and development from different disciplinary and at times radically divergent perspectives. At the same time, they collectively work through the limitations, possibilities and promise of our best Caribbean imaginings.

Contents

• Selected Discography and Awards
• INTRODUCTION “Baadest-Bajan, Wickedest World-Gurl” HILARY McD. BECKLES AND HEATHER D. RUSSELL
• CHAPTER 1 Westbury Writes Back: Rihanna Reclaimed HILARY McD. BECKLES
• CHAPTER 2 Rihanna as Global Icon and Caribbean Threshold Figure DON D. MARSHALL
• CHAPTER 3 International Identity: Rihanna and the Barbados Music Industry MIKE ALLEYNE
• CHAPTER 4 “What’s My Name?” Reading Rihanna’s Autobiographical Acts ESTHER L. JONES
• CHAPTER 5 She Dances on the Holodeck CURWEN BEST
• CHAPTER 6 From “F Love” to “He Is the One”? Rihanna, Chris Brown and the Danger of Traumatic Bonding DONNA AZA WEIR-SOLEY
• CHAPTER 7 Rihanna and Bajan Respectability AARON KAMUGISHA
• CHAPTER 8 Rihanna: Diaspora Citizen, Bajan Daughter, Global Superstar HEATHER D. RUSSELL
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements

Ever wondered why Montserrat have a day off for St Patrick’s Day too?

TheJournal.ie
Dublin, Ireland
2016-03-17

Laura McAtackney, Associate Professor in Sustainable Heritage Management (Archaeology)
Arhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Krysta Ryzewski, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

This edited article, written by Laura McAtackney and Krysta Ryzewski, is part of a chapter ‘Historic and contemporary Irish identity on Montserrat, the ‘Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ in Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity & Evelyn O’Callaghan ‘s book: Caribbean Irish Connections for University of West Indies Press.

CONTEMPORARY MONTSERRAT IS marketed globally as the “Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This tagline inspires tourists and scholars to visualise a verdant, fertile paradise bolstered by genuine and lasting historic links to Ireland.

The island’s Irish connections have long been a source of interest for local residents and tourists alike, and over the past two decades government agencies, the tourism industry and local communities have made concerted efforts to bolster its Irish legacy and build upon perceived connections between present-day Montserrat and historic Irish communities.

Its most prominent example of these efforts is St Patrick’s Day, a national holiday that simultaneously commemorates the island’s Irish heritage and a failed uprising by Afro-Caribbean slaves and members of the island’s free black community on the same day in 1768.

The St Patrick’s holiday has grown into a week-long festival that attracts international tourists and acts as a major homecoming event for Montserrat’s diaspora community.

Today, Montserrat’s connection to an ‘Irish’ identity is strong but this has not always been the case…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay: Scotland’s poet of the people

The Guardian
2016-03-20

Kevin McKenna

Jackie Kay at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh last week. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA

To say there was a national outpouring of joy at the appointment of Jackie Kay as Scotland’s makar last week might be overdoing it, but not by much. In previous decades, perhaps, not many beyond bearded and ponytailed literary circles might even have known the identity of a new makar or even the purpose of the post. The profile and efforts of the two previous incumbents, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead, though, have helped to raise awareness of the position so that it has begun to insinuate itself into our national life.

Following the appointment of Kay as Scotland’s national poet last Tuesday, a press colleague who had interviewed her was simply thrilled. “She’s just wonderful; she’ll make people read poetry and write poetry who have never done so before.” The words were spoken in a tone that suggested he had touched the great woman’s hem…

…Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father whereupon she was given up for adoption. John and Helen had adopted Kay’s brother, Maxwell, two years earlier. Many years later, she located her biological father and made plans to meet him while harbouring some anxiety as to how this might be received by her adoptive parents who had given her and her brother so much. She has referred to this as a “kind of adultery”…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review – Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-03-18

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World, Sharon H. Chang, Routledge, 2016, 264pp, £27.99, ISBN 978-1612058481

I was really excited to finally get my hands on a copy of this excellent book which focusses on how to navigate successfully raising Asian multiracial children in today’s world. The main argument of the book is that in order to do this parents must analyse their own understanding of racial issues, and seek to expand their knowledge and awareness in this area so they can adequately support their offspring. Considering the content of the book, the mention of ‘a post-racial world’ in its title can only be taken as tongue-in-cheek since the writer argues throughout the text that the world is anything but this and sets about exposing how white racism continues to be pernicious and pervasive, simply mutating over time rather than weakening in power.

The book is split into an introduction followed by 8 chapters and is based on an interview study conducted by the author with multiracial Asian parents. The study explored multiracial Asian parents’ approaches to parenting in conjunction with their attitudes regarding race. Chang, who is an activist, writer and scholar, is multiracial Asian herself, as is her husband. The study highlighted parents often neglect appropriate conversations around race with their children and thus do not support them in developing good self-esteem and coping skills when it comes to dealing with racism…

Read the entire review here.

Jackie Kay unveiled as the new National Poet, or Makar, of Scotland

The Herald
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
2016-03-15

Phil Miller

Poet and author Jackie Kay

The acclaimed writer Jackie Kay is the new National Poet for Scotland.

Ms Kay, who lives in Manchester, who was awarded an MBE for her services to literature in 2006, will succeed Liz Lochhead as the National Poet.

Ms Kay said she spend around half her time in Glasgow, the city where her parents live.

The final selection of Ms Kay was made by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and former first ministers Alex Salmond, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale and Henry McLeish.

The First Minister made the announcement at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh where Ms Kay read one of her own poems, ‘Between the Dee and the Don’.

Ms Kay was born in Edinburgh and raised in Glasgow.

She said she would like to write a poem for the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament later this year, after the Holyrood elections, as well as highlight the plight of refugees.

The announcement was made by Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, who said: “Poetry is part of Scotland’s culture and history, it celebrates our language and can evoke strong emotions and memories in all of us…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay’s Quest For Her Roots – Theresa Muñoz

Scottish Review of Books
Volume 6, Issue 3 (2010-08-12)

Theresa Muñoz

Adopted at birth, Jackie Kay discovered neither of her birth parents were who she’d thought they’d be, her new memoir recalls.

“If you have skin my colour” writes Jackie Kay in her memoir Red Dust Road, “you must be a foreigner.” All of her life, people have asked her where she is from. Glasgow, she’d tell them. Then people would inquire, but where are her parents from? Her parents are from Glasgow and Fife, she’d say. But she would also add that she’s adopted and her birth father is Nigerian. “They’d nod,” Kay says, “with a kind of ‘That explains it’ look”.

Since I moved to Scotland, people have asked me where I’m from. “Vancouver, British Columbia,” I reply. Most leave it at that because they have relatives or friends in Canada and would rather discuss them. But others persist: “Where are you really from?” Once, an older gentleman in the library in Dumfries asked if I was from the Far East. “Yes, I live in Edinburgh,” I replied. He left me alone after that.

It’s not that people shouldn’t ask. I’m happy to tell others that both my parents were born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada, individually, in the Seventies. (They later met in what used to be Simpson’s department store in Toronto.) But the nature of these questions can make you feel like an outsider. As Kay says, “I felt it was being pointed out to me, in a more sophisticated manner, that I didn’t belong in Scotland”.

Other comments are just plain ignorant. Walking down West Princes Street in Glasgow, I passed a man who muttered something about a tan. “Nice tan,” I think he said to me. Kay has also been asked about her tan. In Wigtown a woman asked her and her mother, “Is that lady your daughter? Oh? Your daughter is awful tanned. Is she that colour every day?”

Once or twice things have turned ugly. A fight broke out in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane, when a drunken man asked my Scottish boyfriend where he “bought me”. Kay’s experiences have been much more humiliating. In 1980, during the rise of the British Movement, posters were put up around Stirling University that asked: “Would you be seen with that Irish-Catholic wog called Jackie Kay?” Kay locked herself into her student apartment and was offered police protection.

Racism happens without warning. You never know how to react. Dignity? Fury?…

Read the entire review here.

Respectability Politics: When Mixed Race People Police Each Other

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-03-17

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Respectability politics relates to the efforts of people in marginalized groups to convince their own group members to conform to the thoughts, values and practices of those in the dominant group, instead of challenging those in dominant groups about their problematic behaviours. I’ve been thinking about respectability politics a lot lately because frequently I come across this as a social justice blogger, the administrator for a feminist community and a member of various other online feminist groups.

I am pretty upfront in my activism at times. I can be very direct and expressive. I see this as the Jamaican side of my identity. Some English people can struggle to deal with this part of my Jamaican identity because it differs so widely from notions around British respectability, where traits such as politeness and being reserved and accommodating are highly valued. Other groups of people besides those who subscribe to stereotypical English norms can also struggle to deal with some of my ideas and ways of communicating, especially people who think that those in oppressed groups always have to be super nice to members of dominant groups no matter how much oppression has come their way. I do not personally subscribe to the belief that people in marginalized groups always have to be nice and placate their oppressors, or conform to their oppressor’s value systems. This is clearly oppressive in itself. When it comes down to it, I guess I have more of a Malcolm X philosophy in my approach than an Martin Luther King one (not to discredit the work of MLK). What I mean by that is I prefer radical and confrontation methods in my activism much of the time. That’s just me….

…I’ve been trying to figure out why some mixed race people engage in respectability politics. I think this is really just an elaborate defence. Critiquing whiteness can be particularly uncomfortable for some mixed race people, especially those who have some white heritage. For those of us who have some white heritage (my mother is white so I am included here), critiquing whiteness means we have to look at some of our own privileges and also perhaps how some aspects of our upbringing and family life were or are problematic. It’s not an easy journey to go on, but it’s a necessary one in order to dismantle oppression. For some mixed race people examining whiteness can feel like a betrayal of their white family members and perhaps their own identities…

Read the entire article here.

“Whitening” and Whitewashing: Postcolonial Brazil is not an Egalitarian “Rainbow Nation”

The Postcolonialist
2014-03-04

Sarah Lempp

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of its “discovery” by Portuguese sailor Alvares de Cabral in 2000, Brazil officially presented itself as a “rainbow nation” without discrimination or racism; a place where people from various ethnicities live peacefully together. That the “discovery” caused slavery and death for millions of Indigenes and Africans was overlooked. The Portuguese colonization was seen as a “non-imperial act, an exercise of fraternity and intercultural and interethnic democracy”, says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.[1]

The German author Stefan Zweig, who fled to Brazil from Nazi Germany, already considered Brazil a paradise characterized by hybridity and said in 1941 that Brazil “has taken the racial problem, that unsettles our European world ad absurdum in the simplest manner: in plainly ignoring its validity.” (translation S.L.)[2] According to Zweig, “for hundreds of years the Brazilian nation relies on the sole principle of free and unrestrained mixing, perfect equality of black and white, brown and yellow. (…) There are no limits to colours, no boundaries, no supercilious hierarchies…”[3]

Hence the image of Brazil as a tolerant, peaceful, “mestiço” nation is not at all new. But it ignores then and still today the multifaceted forms of discrimination and specifically Brazilian shapes of racism…

Read the entire article here.